What is psilocybin? Let Roland Griffiths explain here.Griffiths is an addiction pharmacologist, psychedelics & spirituality expert and recipient of the 2015 Nathan B. Eddy Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.

﻿Could psilocybin-induced mystical experience also help homebound older adults, a patient population with unmet mental health needs that are too-often treated with benzodiazepineslike diazepam or lorazepam and even harmful antipsychotics in some cases?

Fourteen months after receiving psilocybin in a landmark study at Johns Hopkins University, 94% of those who received the drug said the experience was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives; 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience.

According to the American Medical Association, "between seven key emotions–amusement, awe, contentment, compassion, pride, love and joy–research found that four specific emotions—joy, pride, contentment and awe—predicted lower levels of IL-6, a pro-inflammatory cytokine.

​Interestingly, awe had the strongest negative relationship to IL-6, even when researchers controlled for the other six positive emotions, personality measures and a third method of measuring emotions."

Much is left to be learned about the effect of hallucinogens on positive emotion–joy, pride, contentment, and awe–and how it modulates the immune system, inflammation, HPA-axis, and other areas of health.

​​Unlike benzos, opioids, and muscle relaxants, psilocybin is not addictive and would carry a low risk of diversion to the community if limited to a strictly regulated psychotherapeutic or spiritual settings.

Source: Johns Hopkins University. Click for link.

The author of Depression in Homebound Older Adults: Recent Advances in Screening and Psychosocial Interventions, gives reasons why current medication has not worked in our older loved ones who are homebound:

"Antidepressant medication use among older adults has significantly increased in recent years. A significant proportion of depressed homebound older adults take antidepressant medications (e.g., from 11.5% in 2000 to 39.5% in 2007 regardless of diagnosis), mostly prescribed by their primary care physicians; however, many have limited response to medication alone and remain symptomatic.

Most depressed homebound older adults prefer psychotherapy to pharmacotherapy, perhaps because only the former can teach skills to cope with their multiple chronic medical conditions, disability, social isolation, and limited financial resources.

However, referring homebound older adults to specialty mental health services for psychotherapy seldom succeeds due to inaccessibility, shortage of geriatric mental health providers, and cost. Providing in-person psychotherapy is especially expensive for homebound patients, given the costs associated with travel (of clinicians to homes or disabled patients to offices). Despite the high rate of depression among homebound older adults, their mental health needs are largely unmet. This will be important as baby boomers increasingly become homebound (Choi 2013).

​​Would specialty mental health services even work?

Are they accessible? Are therapies as efficient as possible so that Medicare would be willing to pay for them?

Current drug therapies do not work well in homebound older adults and our current healthcare system leaves most areas of the United States without adequate behavioral healthcare.

However, if thought leaders in the United States do not focus heavily on therapies that are affordable, decent mental health care will never be available to most Americans. Medicare and insurance companies simply will not want to pay for inefficient and unpredictable therapies.

"If you can treat anxiety and depression in people that are dying, why do they have to be dying? If people have chronic anxiety about something or depression, it may be that we'll find treatment so that people don't have to be on antidepressants for years and years and years." David Nichols, PhD, Former Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology, Professor Emeritus, Purdue UniversityWatch the full documentary: https://youtu.be/dm1TPRQyYnAMore: http://www.ouramazingworld.org/spirituality/psilocybin-prozac-xanax

​In May 2015, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) highlighted the work of Anthony Bossis and fellow NYU psilocybin researchers Stephen Ross and Jeffrey Guss. In a recent article for ASCO Post, chair of psychiatric oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center William Breitbart detailed the importance of spirituality and meaning in palliative care. Bossis discusses these issues along with powerful patient experiences in the presentation below.

​"In the treatment of depression roughly half of patients will respond to an antidepressant, such as an SSRI. Another group will respond to psychotherapy, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. But what we don't know yet is who will respond to which treatment, and unfortunately we are in a situation of basically treating by trial and error. For example, someone can be on an SSRI for 8, 10, or 12 weeks before we recognize that it is not helpful. That is an awfully long time for someone with a very serious, often life-threatening illness to be on a medication without our knowing whether it is helpful."–Thomas Insel, M.D., Past Director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

Click images below for more information:

Miller (clockwise from upper left) checks what her patient Calla Osborne, 92, had to eat by reading notes kept by Osborne's daughter; Miller explains to John Toombs, 78, that canned soup can be high in sodium; Divina Gaskin, 71, tells Miller about the side effects of her pills; Miller checks in on Gordon Laymon, 76, who lives alone.

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Mental Health Shortage: Options for Self-Medication in America Favor Addiction
​Unhappy with your psychiatrist or psychologist? Wonder why one person can't take care of your needs? Instead, the American mental health system has to have both psychiatrists and psychologists who operate on different paradigms and are inaccessible, unaffordable, and unavailable. Their profession is so magical and secretive that it cannot be questioned by patients and other healthcare professionals, leading to misdiagnoses, overdiagnosis, and the worst abuses seen in healthcare, including billions of dollars in fraud against the U.S. Department of Justice. Add onto that patients who self-medicate with alcohol, opioid analgesics, and benzodiazepines because terrible healthcare, mental health, and drug policy in the United States leave no other options.

Information below is from Cognitive Psychiatry of Chapel Hill and was originally entitled, Unhappy with Psychiatry, Blame Healthcare. The post has since been removed. We still find the information they provided to be helpful.